| About the 2025 award: $50,000 to support the research, creation and presentation of Brown Moon, a multidisciplinary new work and living archive of Afro-Turk matriarchal traditions. |
Melike Vivastine Konur is an Afro-Turk American multidisciplinary visual artist, vocalist and cultural strategist working between Pittsburgh and Istanbul. With performance as her foundation, her work explores erasure in diasporic migration and belonging through the lens of motherhood, using sound, movement, installation and writing to build living archives of Black matriarchal knowledge.
Her practice is immersive, interdisciplinary, and deeply personal—centering the gestures, voices and cultural practices of women whose histories have been overlooked, erased or carried quietly across generations. She creates work that moves between ritual and performance, archive and imagination, holding space for memory to be witnessed in real time.
Her recent solo exhibition Women I’ve Been (Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, 2025) and the durational performance Sanctuary of the Sun (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2025) mark a significant expansion of her practice into large-scale visual and performative environments.
Konur’s career spans international stages as a vocalist, actress and television personality in Türkiye. Her music has charted internationally, and she has been featured alongside globally recognized recording artists. This performance lineage continues to inform her visual art practice, bringing a global audience into dialogue with the intimate, ancestral worlds she creates.
Konur is proud to be based in Pittsburgh while carrying an international and diasporic lens shaped across continents. As director of advancement at Kelly Strayhorn Theater and a member of Sibyls Shrine, she bridges global cultural experience with local impact, building a long-term body of work that preserves lineage while shaping new cultural futures—on her own terms.